New World Ardor: DiCaprio's new doc puts human face on global crisis

Leonardo DiCaprio filming a scene for the new global warning 'The 11th Hour.'

By Mike ScottMovie critic

You have to hand it Leonardo DiCaprio. Not only is the guy a talented actor, but as the narrator and a producer of the environmental red-flag documentary "The 11th Hour," he does the seemingly impossible: He actually out-Al-Gores Al Gore.

Not that there's a great deal of new, Earth-shattering information in the film, written and directed by sisters Lelia Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners. We've heard a lot of this before, including in the former vice president's 2006 Oscar-winning doc "An Inconvenient Truth." What Leo and company do, essentially, is reframe the issue as a human crisis, rather than a global crisis, while further exploring the direness of the situation and stressing solutions.

But just as important as what "The 11th Hour" says is how it says it, being every bit as convincing as Gore's film while being both more engaging and more accessible.

With a collection of images that are alternately beautiful and frightening -- and a collection of interviews with scientists, authors, journalists and other experts who exhibit a talent for translating scientific mumbo-jumbo into layman's terms -- "The 11th Hour" is a frightening global warning that is both easy to follow and hard to ignore.

Yes, there are scores of talking heads, but they're a credible bunch, ranging from physicist and beautiful mind Stephen Hawking to former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to, of all people, former CIA director James Woolsey. Besides, scores of talking heads are better than one talking head, no matter how credible, which is pretty much the route "An Inconvenient Truth" took. (More importantly, "11th Hour" doesn't come across as a PowerPoint presentation, which is essentially what Gore's film is.)

DiCaprio on the '11th Hour' set.

What "The 11th Hour" doesn't do is spend too much time trying to convince its audience that climate change is real. Instead, it all but stipulates that as fact -- as the bulk of scientific evidence shows -- then turns to an engrossing discussion of what the real problem is and how to solve it.

The encouraging part is that the film concludes it's mostly the fault of you and me -- the stuff-hungry consumers, who feed resource-hungry big businesses, who in turn feed the pockets of donation-hungry politicians, who then fail to institute meaningful change -- which suggests that the means to change things is within us, if only we can generate the will to do it.

"The problem is the way that we are thinking," author and broadcaster Thom Hartmann says in the film. "The problem is fundamentally a cultural problem."

For people in Louisiana who see "11th Hour," summoning the will to change shouldn't be hard. We've got claim to a dubious environmental hat trick, earning mention in the film for increased hurricane risks, for the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone and for cancer alley.

If there's a flaw in the film, it's more of a marketing issue than a content issue. The folks who most need to be reached aren't the ones who will plunk down $8 to see "The 11th Hour." Rather, they are probably those in the theater next door, the ones who toss their freshly emptied popcorn containers at their feet as they head back to their Hummers and Dodge Rams at the end of some high-octane affair such as "Rush Hour 3" or "Death Sentence."

If the filmmakers really wanted to make a difference, they'd be opening theater doors for free, or handing out DVDs in the theater lobby, or hammering out a broadcasting deal with NBC.

Probably the best they can hope for is to make the environment a legitimate front-burner issue in next year's presidential election -- which would, in fact, be a huge step, since a leadership vacuum is one of the culprits identified by the film as a major contributor to the problem.

For those willing to listen, though, "The 11th Hour" is both a blueprint and a resonant call to action that could be one of the most important films they ever see. If they're willing to really listen.

Now go recycle this newspaper.

_________________________

THE 11TH HOUR

3½ stars, out of 4

Plot: An eco-documentary that explores solutions for saving the planet -- and the human species.

What works: As much as for what it says, the film is important for how it says it, in a manner that is easy to understand and hard to ignore.

What doesn't: The filmmakers may find it difficult to reach those who aren't already converted.